Over the last 10 years the way we travel has been revolutionised by the web. Many of us waved goodbye to high-street travel agents, newspaper classifieds and hours spent staring at endless Teletext pages, and logged on to new hi-tech services.

As the web began taking hold of the public's imagination, the burst of sites and services began shifting the way we thought about travelling, making the idea of grabbing a bag and jetting off cheaper and easier than ever. In fact, the swell of activity in the travel industry seemed so lucrative that it was one of the cornerstones of the dotcom boom.

The boom itself may have ended ignominiously, with many of the individual names crashing spectacularly, but our approach to travel itself remained irrevocably altered.

Britain's travel revolution circled around a pair of innovations that had the web at their heart.

First was the ability to search for what you wanted. In the days before Google, web search was a limited business that was finding its feet. In the mid to late 1990s, a number of sites realised that they could offer a clear way to cut through the jumble, underpinned by vast amounts of information going through computerised reservation systems such as Amadeus and Worldspan. Joining up those dots may seem obvious in retrospect, but it was a revelation at the time.

Sites like Ryanair and easyJet made finding your own cheap flight easier Public Domain

Second was the ability to buy low-cost plane tickets online. The low-cost airline model itself wasn't new - it had already been pioneered by American operator Southwest in the 1970s and then closer to home by Ryanair in the early 1990s. But combined with the deregulation of the European airline industry, the idea went stellar once the web began to find a firm footing with customers.

The easy-to-use self-service websites cut out every middleman and let people explore in a way they hadn't done before. How many of us spent hours weighing up the options of a two-week break in far-flung destinations in corners of Europe we'd never heard of, let alone visited?

In both cases, the benefits were not only clear to customers, but they made sense to businesses too - whether it was a package tour company shifting the last few spaces, an airline making sure it got bums on seats, or a hotel selling off empty rooms on the cheap. The internet opened the door to dynamic pricing - customising prices to individual consumers or fluctuating demand in the market.

"I think it was a combination of exciting new pure play web startups like us and traditional players like easyJet offering unbeatable deals online," says Martha Lane Fox, who started Lastminute.com in 1998 with Brent Hoberman and continued as its managing director until 2003.

She says the way the internet increased competition and helped push prices down was pivotal in the travel revolution - when holidaymakers realised that using the web to book a trip directly could prove significantly cheaper, it then became difficult to ignore the idea.

"This then forced all the big players online and the pricing advantage to buying online meant customers had to look," she adds.

It's easy to think that the pressure to push prices downward was the only impulse that drove the success of travel on the web - but there have been other factors at work.

People also discovered that (with access to the right tools) it was often better to do the job of finding a flight and hotel themselves. In an inversion of the mantra that "time is money", travellers discovered a little of their own time could save them cash - as well as other benefits, like greater control, flexibility and convenience.

The social web means we can check user reviews before we book Public Domain

In addition, the social web - that network of personal recommendations, user-contributed reviews and travel blogs - has created an extra layer of information that has become vital for making decisions in this new world of many choices.

A quick Google search, a couple of clicks and a few site comparisons mean that we can now learn more about our destination than ever before. Whole sites have grown up serving niche audiences like parents looking for travel advice, volunteers or even those who'd rather crash on somebody's sofa for the night.

That's not to say the internet has entirely taken over the travel business. A recent survey in America suggested that only around 40% of people use the web when they are researching or booking travel destinations - and even then, they rely heavily on things like hotel websites. But even so, for those of us who are switched on, the way we travel is broader, deeper and more interesting than ever - and we've got sites like these to thank.

Many of the gaggle of British travel websites that launched in the late 1990s are long-forgotten - remember Bob Geldof's Deckchair.com, once valued at £20m? Lastminute, though, lingers thanks to the way it coincided with our increasingly impulsive travel habits - arriving in the office on Friday morning with a suitcase before deciding which European city to fly to just a few hours later. Bought by rival Travelocity in 2005, it was possibly the most important site of its kind to emerge from the UK.

Now the world's leading online travel company, Expedia started life as an experiment from a company not usually given credit for its internet smarts - Microsoft. Spun off in 1999, and purchased by Ticketmaster two years later, it has hoovered up sites like Hotels.com and Hotwire along the way. Above all, it remains the pioneering travel site thanks to its efforts at trawling vast databases of information - flight reservations, hotel bookings and the like - and opening them up so that users can get a deal.

Ryanair had already taken us towards low-cost flying, but it was the ebullient Stelios Haji-Ioannou's blazing orange fleet that really hit the spot. Offering up deals on its website, the service took a swipe at big rivals like BA with cheeky slogans like "the web's favourite airline", and made it possible for people who had never considered stepping foot outside Britain to jump on a plane and see the world in a new light.

The rise of the user-generated web put power back in the hands of the people - and none more so than this site, which remains the number one source online for user reviews. Now owned by Expedia, it has its quirks - the reviewers themselves often seem so cosseted and pernickety that even a holiday to heaven would garner sniffy comments about the mediocre service. Numerous other sites have tried a similar approach, including the Guardian's own Been there readers' tips site, but for breadth of coverage, you can't beat it.

Sites like Couchsurfing rely on the online community spirit Public Domain

The art of travelling cheaply has always been appealing for webheads, but nobody took it further than this quirky site. What began as an experiment by one student (who emailed 1,500 strangers at the University of Iceland to find a bed for the night on a trip to Reykjavik) has now turned into a huge "hospitality exchange network". There have long been sites about extremely low-cost travel - hobotraveler.com, for example - but nothing caught the communal spirit quite like Couchsurfing.

Holiday swaps and owner rentals were the sort of thing that only a very select number of people did before the advent of the web. For the seller, advertising for tenants was an expensive, hit and miss affair, while the buyer rarely knew whether somebody was trustworthy or not. But sites like VRBO (Vacation Rentals By Owner) and Homeexchange.com helped pioneer a kind of peer-to-peer holidaymaking - and opened up new horizons to hordes of people along the way.

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